Posted
by
timothy
on Tuesday October 23, 2012 @07:47AM
from the objective-stance dept.

Nerval's Lobster writes "In a YouTube interview released by Microsoft, co-founder Bill Gates offered a few hints of where Microsoft plans on taking Windows in coming years. 'It's evolving literally to be a single platform,' he said, referring to how Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 share a kernel, file system, graphics support, and other elements. At least in theory, that will allow developers to port apps from the desktop/tablet OS to the smartphone OS with relatively little work. The two operating systems already share the same design aesthetic, with Start screens composed of colorful tiles linked to applications. Gates also praised natural user interfaces — which include touch and voice — while taking a subtle dig at Apple's iPad and other tablets on the market. 'People want to consume their mail, reading, video anywhere, and they want it to be awfully simple,' he said. 'But you want to incorporate touch without giving up the kind of mouse, keyboard capability that's just so natural in most settings.'"

If you try to "incorporate touch without giving up the kind of mouse, keyboard capability that's just so natural in most settings.", you end up with Windows 8, Unity, and others I don't even want to know about. Keep touch interfaces out of my desktop, please.

Workstation with large monitor: Touch is horrible. I don't want to move my 30" monitor any closer to me, and I don't want to reach way out to it.

Lay the monitor almost flat on the table. It would feel like drawing with pencil and paper. Upright is fine if it's mounted on the wall, and you're standing in front of it, like they they show in the movies

Not to mention the awful vertical angle for which screens are not built. In order for the vertical angle to be bearable, you will have to shove the monitor halfway into your belly, if you're thin. If you're even remotely fat, well, shove it with more force. Yay.

Screens laid down are horrible when using a keyboard. There's just no easy way to do it. For serious data entry, even a mouse is an irritation, something that we specifically design our software to avoid so that data entry can happen at maximum speed.

Screens laid down are horrible when using a keyboard. There's just no easy way to do it. For serious data entry, even a mouse is an irritation, something that we specifically design our software to avoid so that data entry can happen at maximum speed.

Touch would make the irritation of mouse use ten times worse.

The sort of person who thinks that a monitor based on a drawing board is a good idea isn't doing a lot of data/text entry. They're probably graphic artists, which is to say Apple-using wankstains with ironic facial hair and thick-rimmed glasses with no lenses in..

However it is possible. I have given content creation / editing (as in writing software) on both iPad and my Samsung Galaxy S3 the old college try. In many ways, it is this close to actually working and replacing my laptop. With my galaxy I've used both bluetooth and USB mice. I would break down the support for using a mouse on the latest version of Android as:Hardware support: 95%OS support: 75%App support: 5%

The problem lies with the apps. They simply aren't written to take proper advantage of a mouse

Hmm, the gestures I have to make to browse anything on a tablet are way larger than gestures I have to do with my mouse on like 10x larger screen. Then, every time you do "click" on anything with your hand, it is now blocking your view, so you have to move it away, so you can see the result, before navigating further.

Navigating GMail, using mouse or like a gazillion different key bindings they have is so much easier than on any touch device.

I think the point that there are differences is valid and is pretty self evident if you actually produce anything involving repetitive motion which a lot of actual desk work does. If you haven't done desk work then you probably have no idea. Managing is not what I am talking about. Typing out hundreds or thousands of lines of text is what I am talking about. Or designing something in a CAD. Doing any of this through touch would just cause me to throw things.

Have you actually tried using Windows 8? It's still very easy to navigate the new UI with a keyboard and mouse. They've adapted a lot of old hotkeys/shortcuts to Metro and added a few new ones. After about 15 minutes I felt nearly as productive as I normally am in Windows 7.

Yes, I have. Well, not exactly Windows 8, but Windows Server 2012, which is the same interface.

It took me 15 minutes to figure out where Windows Update was. This is a server and doesn't need a stupid touch interface that makes it impossible to find sysadmin tasks. If anything, it should be an option on RDP servers, and that's it.

I really wonder what the hell the devs were smoking when they put a touch interface on a server.

Tip: Use the bottom-right corner of your screen to find the search tool. Instead of clicking the Windows button and typing a search string. Oh yeah, the interface is so much better now. [/sarcasm]

They weren't smoking anything. They were told to do it, in order to provide a consistent interface across all Windows.

I know from experience that there are processes which look like each other superficially. Management then wants to push a unified interface. The domain where I met this problem was in doing the version control for a product and its associated subsystems. These are developed separately. The integration phase (product) is just different from the development phase (subsystems). However, there

It took you 15 minutes to type "upd" while on the Start screen? Dear $DEITY, I hope you aren't managing anything important anywhere, if your idea of how to interact with a computer is stuck in the last decade...

Over the next umpteen years there's a good chance that I will not be the only one administering these servers. While I can use (and like) Powershell, the next person to come along may not care to use it and use the GUI, depending on what they're using.

I'm not forcing my own tastes down the organization's throat. I'm keeping in mind the long term usability for others administering the server, not just my personal preferences.

So you click on results in settings. Not one result that actually matches "Windows Update". There is one that says "Install optional updates" but when you want security updates, what do you do?

The only way I found it after a lot of farting around was to go to the lower-right corner of the screen, click Settings, click Control Panel, change View by: to icons, and only then is Windows Update shown.

It's still very easy to navigate the new UI with a keyboard and mouse.

How about just a mouse? I didn't think so, if you want to get stuff done as quick as windows 7 you have to short cut somewhere, on the desktop or in metro, or you have to use a quick key. The mouse travel distance in metro is just awful. Right clicking to see all your apps where you have to travel from the left to the right side of the screen is just bad design, why isn't 'all apps' also on the left hand side?

It's not that W8 is broken, or that it doesn't work. It's that bad design pisses off users who are

Keyboard/Mouse and Touchscreens can work together if it's done right. With tablet laptops, and touchscreen All in 1 PC's, it can be convenient to use both. Problem with Windows 8, the touch part only works well with Metro, not the standard desktop. Try using a touchscreen with the standard desktop browser, it doesn't work.

The surface ARM is no more than another netbook (remember those? TABLETS replaced them), and the surface x86 version is just another ultra portable with touch screen support.

As far as Window 8 is concerned, Microsoft is used to shoving its products by leveraging its monopoly in the OEM market. The case with mobile devices however is very different. Microsoft HAS to prove Windows 8 is worth all the fuss (comparing to existing Android and iOS), with the only advantage (which is yet to be tested) of having apps for your Windows based x86 share information with their ARM counterparts (please spare the build-once for both platforms BS). This synchronization may have been a killer app in the early mobile device days, but today information is synchronized across all platforms quite easily.

Microsoft is definitely all-in on this one, if people adopt Windows 8 as a mobile OS, we may very well see Windows taking over the mobile devices market. If it won't, it's only a matter of time until desktop OS's (or at least Windows OS for most desktops) is obsolete, and so will be Microsoft.

Only time will tell, but my money is on a colossal failure for Microsoft

I still am far from convinced that netbooks were killed by tablets. IMO they were dying out before the ipad was released, due to manufacturers not realizing why most of them sold. Note this is my limited experience of working in retail showed a different story (admittedly an unscientific very small sample size). In general 95% of the time I saw a netbook sell, it was as a cheap equivelant of a laptop. IE people wanting a nice $150-$200 device to take notes in class to do basic notetaking etc... If someone w

Microsoft is definitely all-in on this one, if people adopt Windows 8 as a mobile OS, we may very well see Windows taking over the mobile devices market. If it won't, it's only a matter of time until desktop OS's (or at least Windows OS for most desktops) is obsolete, and so will be Microsoft. Only time will tell, but my money is on a colossal failure for Microsoft

This sounds plausible, except Microsoft will not fail so much as change, though perhaps with far less profit. Somewhat like Apple, Windows 8 looks like the largest desktop O/S is moving toward the computer as appliance. This suggests two things:

1) A trend to very slowly reduce the popularity of general purpose computers, shifting people to limited-task devices.
2) Year of the Linux desktop jokes aside, we really could be headed toward Linux/BSD as the main traditional desktop O/S. Not because of advertisin

The only real problem I see is that Metro apps can only be distributed through the Windows Store.

This will hurt them badly.

Direct from MS:

Any developer who builds these apps, must have a Developers License and each app must go through a certification process and be validated before being placed in the Windows Store. If you are an Enterprise customer, you can SideLoad Apps, but these must also be certified nad can only be used with a special product key that is available to Enterprise customers.

After that anti-trust investigation and suit in the 1990s, Microsoft has been waiting for other companies to take innovative steps so that it can adopt them later. The Apple "app store" was a boon to Microsoft, as they couldn't have done it on their own without ending up back in court.

What's come of this is an intelligent strategy. They are essentially reviving an older strategy [arstechnica.com] for making a standardized interface, which will allow developers and users more ability to mix-and-match interface components.

It's also intelligent to sneak away from the venerable win32 and make a gift to developers, which is one platform for mobile, desktop and any other form of computing (knowing Gates: smart house and smart agents) that will arise.

While I have my doubts about the Fisher-Price interface as well, I also felt this way about the "new" desktop in Windows XP. It'll be great to see Microsoft restoring some competition to the world of computing with this new strategy.

More like a trojan horse for developers. Microsoft's decision to make WinRT-based apps appstore-only is a total deal breaker. There is no way I am going to write applications that I am not allowed to sell directly to the user. There is no way any user with half a brain would make himself dependent on an application that can only be installed through the appstore. Those are strings, Pinocchio, and if you voluntarily attach them to yourself or your business, you will get exactly what you deserve.

Just host the.APPX file on your website, and give the user instructions on sideloading it. It's quite easy, actually, although they do have to enable sideloading first (a single Powershell command).

You'll probably make a hell of a lot more money selling through the Windows store than you will selling through your own site, or through traditional retail channels, of course. But you aren't *unable* to sell through those channels. It's just going to have less exposure to the users and require a less intuitive

Just host the.APPX file on your website, and give the user instructions on sideloading it. It's quite easy, actually, although they do have to enable sideloading first (a single Powershell command).

Not for everybody. According to Microsoft, sideloading [microsoft.com] is only available on Windows 8 Enterprise, and Windows Server 2012, and only if the computer in question is joined to a domain. While it is standard practice to set up an internal domain at large corporations, a small business or a home user never do that. I

All laptop touchpads these days support multi-touch; APple may have been the first but it's been available on HP and Lenovo, at least, for well over a year now (I don't know when it was first introduced; I don't upgrade hardware that often).

Touchpad and stylus peripherals (for laptop or desktop, or for that matter tablet) are available, and they certainly work on Win8. Win8 uses the NT6.2 kernel, so *any* driver written for NT6.x (that is, Vista, Win7, or the various releases of Server 2008) will work fine

I was going to make a comment about smudges on your smart phone... But I guess it's a lot easier to wipe your phone on your pant leg.(Attempts to wipe monitor with shirt. Breaks shirt, office dress code.)

You're not alone, I cringe when my girlfriend touches my monitor to point out something to me as it is. My screen cleaner and soft cloth are on permanent stand by!

The idea of my main high-res monitor (which I use for both productivity and gaming) being as grease covered as my phone really does make me cringe.
My retina display has cataracts! (yes I know retina is an Apple brand but I'm sure you get my point)

" 'It's evolving literally to be a single platform,' he said, referring to how Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 share a kernel, file system, graphics support, and other elements. At least in theory, that will allow developers to port apps from the desktop/tablet OS to the smartphone OS with relatively little work."

Hasn't Gates been chasing the dream of one Windows to rule them all for something like two decades now? The line of 'Handheld PC' and 'Pocket PC' devices didn't share as much low level architecture, because the hardware wouldn't permit it at the time; but did everything they could to drag a desktop UI onto a teeny touchscreen, and 'tablet' meant getting Windows for Pen Computing 1.0 with your Win3.1 back when meteorites were still mopping up the last of the dinosaurs....

The summary puts "touch" and "future" together as if touch is a new thing.

Look up the HP 150. This was a desktop computer with a touch screen back in 1983. I'm sure Bill Gates saw this at the 1983 Comdex - a few booths down MS was demonstrating a vaporware product called "Windows". There are reasons we don't waste our money on touch screens for desktop computers, and they were all hashed out a long time ago. But somehow touch screens are magically new and the old reasons magically don't exist any more.

Businesses require an OS with applications that allow for interactivity including ease of multi-tasking. The idea of an OS geared toward uni-tasked pipelined user consumption is only a one-way street. I knew it was bad, but having Bill Gates endorsement this paradigm is the final nail in the coffin.

From my POV, Microsoft Office 365 and VM'ed instances of Server 2012 is the only thing they have worth offering. The client side OS and computing platform paradigm is the antithesis of corporate productivity. Clearly they're abandoning this market segment. Either intentionally or not is irrelevant at this point.

It is intentional. We are entering the age of consumer driven technology development. Even Microsoft is betting on the BYOD bandwagon.

The problem is, and it's going to take considerable time taking the wrong road to understand, consumers do not know what is right or wrong for the task at hand. We are abandoning working tool sets for barely usable tech, and every new gadget manufacturer assumes that the influx of new users of that device is going to overshadow legacy users. Steven Jobs had a knack for doing

Wasn't Bill Gates the industry visionary who wrote a book about the future of computing and downplayed the Internet? Wasn't Bill Gates the technology visionary at Microsoft who caused Microsoft to miss the onslaught of the Internet, resulting in Microsoft having to scramble to catch up (some might say they never caught up)?

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Is this the same Bill Gates who is once again talking about what the future brings?

and steve jobs correctly predicted that computers will go the way cars did back in the early 1900's. from what were essentially open parts to a fully vertical system where one company either makes most of the components or designs and manufactures the whole product.

MS's problem was that the OEM's never tried to put out a decent product

Twenty years ago most computers other than PCs were 'fully vertical systems where one company either makes most of the components or designs and manufactures the whole product'. So that's not much of a prediction.

Of course we then decided it was a bad idea because the more open PC was much cheaper than a Unix workstation built by a company with no competition other than different and incompatible Unix workstations. Took the best part of a generation for the wheel to turn back.

Open letter to M$... It's clear you're trying to copy Apple's success in the tablet/smartphone world by creating so-called unified interface for both them and desktops. But if Apple is such a clear leader and their vision for the future is so good, then why doesn't OSX look like iOS?

Apple borrowing from BSD was a brilliant move. OS9 (the predecessor to OSX) was absolutely horrible. Slow, prone to crashing, and it ran on PowerPC chips that were far slower than Intel chips. When Apple brought Jobs back it was partly because of the operating system that NeXT had developed that was based on BSD. It evolved into what is now OSX.

Apple did not invent BSD or Linux or UNIX but what they did do was take a very stable, open source, version of UNIX (BSD) and put a beautifully appealing graphical front end on it (AQUA). I would argue that OSX is the most user friendly version of any UNIX or Linux based kernel. It's very stable, it's easy to use and it looks nice. I would bet that a lot of Mac users don't even know, or care, that it's based on UNIX. They just know that it works and is enjoyable to use.

Apple hasn't invented a lot of things but they have taken what others have done and made it better. That's innovation. In the same way that Android looks and works very much like IOS. In the same way that nearly every modern smartphone uses a touch interface. Apple didn't invent the touch interface either, they just perfected it. Some people think that Microsoft "stole" the GUI from Apple, who in turn "stole" it from XEROX. Who knows?

In my view, none of that stuff is stealing. It's simply the industry realizing that there is a better way to do things and then everyone embraces it. Balmer and Gates have seen the writing on the wall. PC sales are down drastically. For many people, particularly in developing countries, a smartphone is their first and only internet enabled device. That's where the growth is. So Windows is going to have to evolve if it wants to stay relevant in the consumer space. Time will tell how successful it is.

I largely concur with your post, but this bit isn't true for the time period you are talking about, when OS 9 was current. PowerPC had an early speed advantage over contemporary Intel and mostly maintained that, though the projected advantage didn't increase in the way the PowerPC consortium had predicted. It was only once speeds hit around the 1GHz mark that Intel started to pull ahead decisively. The G4 of ~2003 was a pretty decent chip but

OSX is based on NextStep (which came to Apple with Steve Jobs return) which was in turn based on BSD. No Linux there.

Apple did adopt KHTML to develop WebKit but they've contributed back since it was GPL and the result is that there are other significant browsers in the market based on WebKit (Chrome for example) and since there are now several strong rendering engines, the MSIE hegemony has been broken. MS has borrowed plenty of code from open source too and have also contributed back where it suited them

apple got lucky with the price of mobile components dropping to reasonable levels...

yeah, they just "stumbled" into being the most profitable company in the world.
it's their manufacturing capabilities and their supply chain logistics that make this happen. there's absolutely no luck involved in this.

There is always Luck involved in success. A good business will try to minimize how much luck is involved but it is there.

Apple got Lucky in a couple areas.1. The Fruity iMacs were popular enough to get media attention. Which allowed for more buzz after job releases new products. These iMacs could have been seen as a cheap rip off and too insulting to the end user to buy.

2. The iPod was really popular. It could had just as easily been just an apple fan boy toy. While other markets expanded.

Apple make relatively expensive niche computers (cue the Apple fanboys saying that they're actually cheaper than an equivalent PC from Dell) and wildly successful consumer electronic gadgets. Their success means nothing in itself, after all no one here ever liked Microsoft just because they were the most profitable tech company for a long time.

Nothing to do with Luck. Microsoft's mistake was assuming people wanted a desktop experience on a device too small for it to be effective. They have now come to their senses and come up with a good cell phone experience but now want to do the opposite and inflict a mobile interface on their desktop users.

As for Apple: The core kernel may be similar but their interfaces are completely different between desktop and mobile.

Also attributing it to luck doesn't really make sense since Apple had been planning the device for years, and only released it when the components had become cheap enough to sell the device at what they believed to be a reasonable price point. Also, cheaper components and better touch screens are insufficient to explain where the iPhone came from. Why is it that Apple was first to market with a device like the iPhone, and it took other manufacturers years to catch up?

The iPhone was not obvious. When it was first demoed, people responded in one of two ways: (a) "Holy shit, that's some amazing sci-fi tech right there and I want one,"; and (b) "No physical keyboard, less Exchange support than a Blackberry. Lame."

What Microsoft really wants to do is leverage their desktop monopoly to mobile. They tried to do this by marketing 'Windows Familiarity' as a plus for WinPhone 6. But that didn't work, because as you stated, the desktop is a lousy metaphor for a phone. So now they're remaking their desktop into a clone of their phone so that they can tout the similarities between their desktop monopoly OS and their mobile offerings. This time it's the new desktop interface that's inappropriate for the form factor, but t

> Microsoft's mistake was assuming people wanted a desktop> experience on a device too small for it to be effective.

Microsoft's current mistake is assuming that people want a smartphone experience on a desktop PC with a 24" 1920x1080 display. Unless I'm doing a large spreadsheet or watching streaming video, I usually do not want apps to be fullscreen. And no, I do not intend to risk RSI by sticking my arm out 2 feet and dragging my fingers all over the 24" screen.

apple got lucky with the price of mobile components dropping to reasonable levels and the fact that samsung and others started to make touch screens

Dropping mobile component prices would be advantageous to anyone involved in the mobile market. Touch screen technology could have been used by MS as well, but wasn't. Why did it turn out just to be "lucky" for Apple?

It was lucky for Apple because they also had a vision. Or to put it another way, it didn't matter how cheap touch screens and mobiles got because Microsoft was too busy trying to stick a full blown crap OS on mobile and everyone else was making a different OS for each damn model of phone that came out. Before Apple, there was a pretty good chance whatever touch screen device you had was a dead end of some type and the manufacture wouldn't continue to put out updates for very long, or the next version could

MS has been doing mobile devices since the late 1990's trying to make a unified OS.

Yes and those Windows CE PDAs and WinPhones kinda sucked. Microsoft tried to do too much with the limited power of the embedded processors of that time. The low resolution screens made the window UI practically useless, but Microsoft refused to abandon it on the phones. Palm was a better PDA and Handsprings Phone/PDA had a much better user experience than the slow clunky Microsoft CE devices.

+1. Palm dropped the ball. The TX was just a step away from being a smartphone. They got dazzled by RIM and went in the Treo direction then just seemed to implode. Apple was smart to move in there, no doubt but the prize was Palm's to throw away.

The problem was that they tried to make a unified OS and the end result was windows mobile was butt ugly and broken. You can assume Appl just got lucky but comparing the iphone to a blackberry and Windows mobile and it's not hard to see why it was so appealing and even Android was going down the route of being a blackberry clone until someone used their board room access to borrow some ideas.

Who cares what the old man says anymore? As the Salesforce chap said,Windows is irrelevant these days.

What grade are you in, son? Freshman in college? Junior in high school? because it's pretty damned obvious that you've never seen the inside of an office building. Every single PC in almost every office (Ernie Ball notwithstanding) [cnet.com] is running Windows. On desktops. And there are a lot more PCs in offices than in homes. That said, I'm running kubuntu at home and anyone who has seen many of my comments knows I

Gone are the days of desktops, and apps specifically developed for the desktops. These days,most apps can be run off a browser. The Android ecosystem has captured the low and medium ends of the tablet spectrum, and there are gazillion apps for Android, and Windows apps are miniscule in comparison. It will take a while yet, but highly likely that Windows and Microsoft will continue to slide into irrelevance sooner than later.

Not to discredit their diligent use of dirty tactics, but Microsoft got where they were through more than just skulduggery. They were sometimes at the right place at the right time, sometimes not at the wrong place at the wrong time, sometimes they saw a good thing and bought it out. The original Dartmouth BASIC was nowhere near as flexible as what Gates & Allen produced. You don't get that big through dirty work alone, even though it helps.